Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2026

Journal Title

Santa Clara Law Review

ISSN

0146-0315

Abstract

This article details and advocates for a general methodology for creating a "microexpert" grounded in a user-defined set of legal sources and widelyaccessible tools for integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into legal analysis. The study focuses particularly on background contract excuse doctrines of impossibility, impracticability, and frustration of purpose, which are collectively a methodologically challenging area of law to rationalize due to factintensive variables that undermine their predictability. Particular challenges include assessing the foreseeability of the event that led to the contract's nonperformance, the extent of the hardship or burden on the party seeking excuse, and the purpose of the contract that was allegedly frustrated.

The study uses Google's popular NotebookLM tool to create an AI microexpert grounded exclusively in a fifteen-year corpus of judicial opinions involving parties' assertions of contractual excuses beyond the express terms of the contract. This source-centric method gives the user maximized control over the body of legal materials while simultaneously mitigating the risk of AI hallucination. The article demonstrates that while this tool does not replace human judgment, it enables legal scholars and practitioners to perform specialized analyses with a depth and scope that are not so efficiently possible if done manually. The study concludes that this method can be replicated in other areas of law, empowering lawyers to create reliable, specialized tools for their work.

First Page

244

Last Page

303

Num Pages

60

Volume Number

66

Issue Number

2

Publisher

Santa Clara University School of Law

File Type

PDF

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